Book #79 of 2024: Different for Boys | DNF: Dogs of Chernobyl

[thistlechaser]

Continuing current project: A book with a word in the title for each letter of the alphabet, checking my Kindle from oldest towards newer. (This project needs a catchier name...)

B: Different for Boys
C: Dogs of Chernobyl

Different for Boys by Patrick Ness.

Quick synopsis: Horny teenage boys in high school. Some gay, some straight. One homophobic.

Brief opinion: A potentially good story greatly hurt by a style trick and some extremely ugly illustrations.

Plot: Four boys who grew up as basically neighbors are now in high school. Three are sports-y (big, tall), and one went into theater (skinny, never grew taller).

One boy is gay, one is straight, one is bi(?), and one has gay sex but is also a violent, raging homophobe.

The homophobe (Charlie) and the maybe-bi kid (Ant) have sex on a regular basis, which makes things weird for Ant in school.

Things come to a head when Charlie physically attacks Ant for being gay.

Writing/editing: Both were fine. What I could see of them.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: The censoring of certain words (curses/adult things) would be bad enough, but the characters knew it was happening. They'd say things like "Hey, that word didn't get a black box over it!"

I've never taken a picture of my Kindle before, but there's no screen capture function on it.



Some pages had no censoring, some pages had a couple words, that page was a bad one.

I found the illustrations to be SO ugly as well. I'd think they were supposed to have been done by the high school characters doodling, but it was never mentioned that any of them could draw.

Also, the drawings were so inaccurate. Three of the four characters had a rugby-ish build, but all the drawings were of these skinny guys.

The book was also really short, maybe 100 pages long with many full page illustrations.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️ ½ - Disliked, rounding up to Okay for Goodreads. Parts of the story were okay, but all the extra stuff made it so much harder to enjoy.

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DNF #63: The Dogs of Chernobyl by Justin Morgan. I had such high hopes for this story. A talking animal book! About an area of the world I'm interested in! But wow, my hopes were dashed so quickly.

The dogs might as well have been human. Acted human, knew too much, they were completely unbelievable as dogs.

Plus this self-published book author did the thing I hate so much: Made up a publisher so the book wouldn't seem self-published. (The "publisher" has only published three books, all by Justin Morgan...)

Comments

[resonant.livejournal.com]

What odd censoring!

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

The author likes to play around with different styles and things like that. Sometimes it works for me, sometimes not.

If the characters hadn't been aware it was happening, I'd have been somewhat more okay with it.

[jeane nevarez (from livejournal.com)]

They both sound pretty bad! I have never seen a book with blacked-out words like that, nor so many that it made the sentences unreadable. I've seen ones that put just the first letter and then a dash- so you can guess immediately what the word is, which kind of makes it pointless anyway in my opinion.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Yeah, both ways are bad. What's the point of censoring if you can effortlessly read the word? But Ness's method was sort of worse, because I had to keep thinking what word was meant. Some were easy (shit/fuck used as insults), but in the middle of sex scenes I really, REALLY do not want to think about what word is being used for underage sex.

[jeane nevarez (from livejournal.com)]

Ugh, no kidding. Just leave all those details out, it's enough to know what they were doing in the abstract sense.